People and places
An extraordinary idea that led to an inspirational school Adrian Thirkell introduces Sekolah Bisa! Ramadan, an eight-year-old Indonesian boy, was enrolled at Sekolah Bisa! in its inaugural year, 2011. He was auspiciously named after the holy month of the Muslim year when the fast is observed, sunrise to sunset. But his life in reality was wholly inauspicious. He was born into a shanty; an agglomeration of makeshift shacks constructed on marginal land by internal migrants from the hinterlands of central Java who, in their thousands, migrate to the capital city of Jakarta in search of work, invariably ending up in so-called pemulung or scavenging communities. As a result Madun, as he is called by friends, was reductively recast by his uprooted and disruptively imposed social condition not so much as a child but as a function of the localised micro-economy of a shanty and obliged to beg from the age of 5. At age 8, however, there was an unlikely, serendipitous change in his life and the lives of other children who lived, shoeless and indigent, in his community. The British School Jakarta (BSJ), deriving its determination to engage with its nation-host from the platform of the Creativity, Activity, Service (CAS) component of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (then managed at BSJ by Mrs Ann Lautrette and Mr Dorian Brown), and drawing inspiration variously from the UN Convention on The Rights of The Child (Article 28) and Sustainable Development Goals, began to address Madun’s plight in the most powerful way possible: by conceptualising a school expressly for him. Such an ambitious project required, first, the establishing of a relationship of trust between the ‘mother school’, BSJ, and the shanty community – a trust nurtured by setting Spring
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| 2017
up a football team, comprising Madun and his friends, and registering it for the Jakarta Schools Football League (JSFL), Southeast Asia’s largest inter-schools sports tournament and the brainchild of BSJ Chair of Trustees, Mr Brian Dallamore. The experience was utterly transformative. It substantially and unremittingly subverted the structures and dispositions in society which wittingly or unwittingly collude with a situation in which children forfeit their education. Instead, children rendered invisible by marginalisation, inhabiting homes not much more than chicken coops and with no determinable identity, were recast with respect for the personhood which their social conditions had conspired to obscure. Indeed, the children’s emergent identities – aspirational, ambitious, cohesive – fostered in the 3 months of the JSFL, caused all involved in their re-emergence to consider a new paradigm: that of the shanty-scholar. The sight of children, once anonymous but, because of the football, no longer estranged and running their hearts out week after week on the football pitch, was the impetus for the school. It’s easy to conflate, reflexively, a child’s impoverished social condition with a supposed poverty of aspiration. But the congruence of children who lived marginally with IB CAS students at BSJ (those whose lives are steeped in aspiration) revealed a fundamental truth: that a child is shaped by opportunity, not simply by ability. And it was exactly that congruence, the placing side by side of those society had determined would never meet, that ignited a sense of civic duty in the students. So much so, in fact, that they determined to be the means to send each
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